


This Kind of Love

by de4ctiv8edbruh



Category: Emmerdale
Genre: Fluff and Angst, M/M, One Shot, Past Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-04
Updated: 2017-04-04
Packaged: 2018-10-14 16:36:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10540356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/de4ctiv8edbruh/pseuds/de4ctiv8edbruh
Summary: Ross and Robert remember Donna.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is all Anna's fault. -_-
> 
> No major warnings, there will be food and alcohol mentions and casual references to canon-typical violence.
> 
> I'm on tumblr @dingleautomotives.

The daisies were coming up quicker this year. A shorter winter and an unusual onslaught of rain had teased them out earlier than their normal summer bloom. Yellow blossoms dotted the green landscape, bobbing back and forth in the breeze. But whatever the flowers may have believed, it was _not_ yet summer, and Robert felt a chill in the air as he let himself be led.

Ross was tugging Robert gently forward, their fingers interlaced, the smallest of tremors emanating from his normally steady hands. Ross had brought him here under the pretense of romance, but the scene felt strange, like a smile that didn’t quite reach the eyes. A field of summer flowers popping up in the wrong time and place. A romantic afternoon disguising something else.

Robert could tell Ross was nervous. He’d been nervous when he’d first asked Robert if he wanted to come here with him. Uncharacteristically vague about where they were going and why. It fostered a quiet that had followed them the entire trip there, as they stopped in a shop to buy crisps and cans, as they parked and headed, apparently, into a field.

“You do realize it’s freezing.” Robert eventually tried.

Ross turned around gave him a _look_ before silently carrying on, deeper into the daisies. This was important, Robert gathered. So he steeled himself against the cold and followed his boyfriend to… wherever they were going. He could manage an afternoon of cheap beer and bad weather if it would help Ross get around this odd mood. It wasn’t like Ross, to be this withdrawn. It was throwing Robert. He was curious. _Concerned_.

 

* * *

 

The daisies, it turned out, were the point. When Ross finally dragged them both down to sit in the field, yellow bursts of color now hovering at eye-level, Ross plucked one from behind Robert’s ear and tucked it there, a melancholy smile emerging on his face. Robert’s first instinct was to roll his eyes, and remove it, a snide remark hovering on the end of his tongue.

“Oi!” Ross said, snatching the discarded flower. He put it back in place behind Robert’s ear, gently, his fingers trailing down Robert’s face. “Leave it.” He looked serious. Pained.

“Ross…” Robert began, uncertain of how to ask, feeling like the actor in the drama who didn’t know his lines. He searched Ross’s eyes, sure that he was missing something, something painful and dark and unspoken, and Robert needed to know what. Ross met his eyes briefly and looked away, nodding to himself, the visible half of some kind of internal conversation. And then he finally spoke.

“I came here with Donna, once.”

 

_Donna_.

 

Ross didn’t talk about her much. Not to Robert.  
He suspected it bothered Ross… that Robert had been with her too, once. That Robert had _loved_ her too, once.

Robert had made a joke about it one time, the women they’d both had, the number of relationships they’d indirectly shared… _I guess it was inevitable._ Robert had teased, early on, when they were still just calling this “fucking.” _We had to run out of other people to screw eventually, eh? At some point, we were gonna be the only ones left for each other._

But Donna. Robert had learned, he daren’t mention Donna. Not even to mourn her. Not even to suggest that maybe they might like to visit her grave.

Donna was different. Donna was a woman that Ross had _loved_.  
Not the messy, painful kind of love he’d had with Debbie—a destructive, all-consuming force that had torn out chunks of him along the way. No, Donna had been an _easy_ love.

And then Donna had died.

 

* * *

 

Robert wanted to be the kind of love that made Ross whole.

 

“We were still keeping it quiet, about us.” Ross was fiddling with a daisy between his fingers, “So I brought her here. And it was _perfect_.”

Robert nodded, a gesture lost on Ross, whose eyes remained fixed on the ground.

He shrugged his shoulders, “She didn’t want to be seen with me. So we came here, and ate sarnies and drank beers and I can’t ever remember feeling that happy before.”

Robert understood then, he thought. This was a _memory_. A piece of Ross’s history that was both painful and private and _happy_.  
And Ross had brought him here to deal with all of that. To share in it.  
Robert felt, not for the first time, the overwhelming gratitude and awe at being the person Ross chose to bring places like this.

Ross shivered, finally looking back up at Robert with humor in his eyes, “It may not have been this cold though, then.”

Robert snorted, “It _is_ absolutely freezing, you maniac.” Robert reached a cold hand across to Ross’s face and cupped his cheek, “But thank you for bringing me.”

For a moment Ross looked like he might cry, and then he smiled, that cocky, self-aggrandizing grin that Robert had fallen in love with a hundred times.

“How soft do we look, eh?” And Ross kissed him, long and slow and **deep**.

 

* * *

 

After, they laid together, staring up at a grey sky, huddled together under jackets, skin to skin, legs tangled up in each other, trying to sip beer from cans without spilling it on their faces. Robert kept spilling it anyway and Ross would tease him, laugh, and kiss him, softly.

Ross knew how to do that. How to tease without hurting. How to be playful with Robert but leave no sting. Ross had learned, in their time together, how thin-skinned Robert really was. The way that words Robert attempted to ignore stayed with him. The way they lingered. So Ross was careful with him. In ways that no one else was, Ross made sure to follow every tease—no matter how minor—with a small I love you, whether via kiss or look or touch.

 

 

 

Robert felt free here, like this, lying half-naked in a freezing field drinking beer and eating crisps. He hadn’t laughed this much in ages, and there was something surreal about being here, surrounded by flowers, with the man he loved, in the shadow of the woman they’d both loved and lost. But Ross was still edgy, withdrawn—not at all the way he normally was after sex—and Robert could sense that something was off. Whatever they’d come here to do… they hadn’t done it yet.

Finishing the last sip of his beer, Robert sat up and silently started to redress. Ross looked over at him, making no move to do the same, eyes watching Robert intently. “I’m just cold.” Robert reassured him, playfully tossing Ross his shirt and jacket from where they were puddled on the ground. “We don’t have to go anywhere yet.”

They both redressed and Robert laid back down, tugging Ross’s head onto his chest, wrapping his arms tightly around him. He pressed his lips into Ross’s hair and waited. It was something Ross had done with him a thousand times. When he’d gotten Robert to talk about Jack, about Katie, about being bi.

Most of their major arguments since they’d gotten together had been because Ross was pushing Robert too far, too fast, always pressing for more, more, more. But in the end Robert loved him for it. He loved that Ross was so eager to get to every part of him. Every piece of himself that Robert had ever felt ashamed of and hidden away, Ross was determined to pull into the light and take on as his own.

_I get it._ Ross had told him over and over again. _I get it._ And Robert believed him. _I know you do._

But now Robert found himself on the other side of their equation and he was thrown by Ross’s silence. It didn’t matter if Ross was angry or happy or horny or moody. Silence was not his way. So Robert decided it was his turn to push.

“Do you want to talk about her?” Robert began.

“Who?”

“Ross.” Robert chided.

“Do I want to talk about Ross?” came the snarky reply.

“Whatever. If that’s the way you want to be then fine.” Robert sniped back, feeling frustrated. He wasn’t good at this. _Don’t be petulant,_ a Ross in a better mood might say, a criticism that Robert hated for its accuracy.

But today, Ross let out a sigh, and Robert huffed in return, and they lay there for a few more moments in a tense silence, Robert feeling rejected, before Ross finally spoke up.

“I don’t know how.” It was quiet. Broken. Barely above a whisper.

“To talk about Donna?” Robert felt Ross’s chest rise and fall against his own.

“Not to you. It’s…” He trailed off. “I loved her.”

“Yeah, I know.” Robert said softly, running his fingers absently through Ross’s hair.

“And I love you.”

“This I also know,” Robert teased.

“I love you” Ross repeated, “But it’s different. I don’t know… I don’t know if I’ll ever love anyone the way I loved her.”

Robert let the sentence wash over him, expecting it to hurt. Expecting the familiar feeling of second place, second best, second _loved_ to hit him in the chest like it had so many times before. But it never came.

Because, Robert thought, he had loved like that once, too, the way Ross loved Donna—bright and hot and fierce. And he had lost like that as well—sudden and earth-shattering and overwhelming. And as he looked down at the man in his arms he wasn’t sure that he loved Ross the way he’d loved back then, either. Ross was not an _easy_ love.

Ross Barton was constant pushing and nagging. He was incessant talking and insecurity and grandstanding. He was drunken scraps in pubs and cyclical fights with Pete. He was no-boundaries and too much talking. Ross was needy and annoying and shameless. Ross was raw vulnerabilities and decades-old wounds.  
Ross was the love that was going to make Robert whole.

“I get it.” Robert finally said. “I get it.” And Ross was quiet for a long time before he finally uttered, “I know you do.”

 

* * *

 

And then, as if a dam had burst, Ross couldn’t _stop_ talking about Donna. He told Robert their story, all of their stories. He laughed and he cried and when Robert did manage to get a word in, Ross let Robert tell him a few Donna stories of his own.

The sun came out and the grey sky turned blue, the weather finally starting to match the cheerful field of flowers around them. Robert felt whatever doubt had existed between them that morning start to disappear.

He was here, together with Ross, in a memory, in the shadow of a woman they'd both loved. He recognized the piece of Ross he’d just been given and he carefully took it, and placed it inside himself. He wanted every part, every hidden dark part. He wanted to be a love that would slowly, part by part, piece by piece, make them both **whole**.


End file.
